


While It Lasts

by Bofur1



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Best Friends, Blood and Violence, Breaking and Entering, Fluff and Humor, Goodbyes, Grief/Mourning, Orc Hunting, Post-Canon, Revenge, Wake-Up Surprises, World Travel, YOU'RE GOING TO HATE ME
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-08
Updated: 2014-07-08
Packaged: 2018-02-07 23:28:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1918140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bofur1/pseuds/Bofur1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's widely known that when Bofur and Nori are together, they always find themselves up to their necks in trouble...but there is only one time that they don't get out of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	While It Lasts

**Author's Note:**

> The soundtrack for this story is "Sea of Faces" by Kutless, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwbdtmcNOeM  
> Trust me and listen to it before you go any further (and pay special attention to the bridge).

_I hate to do this_ , Nori convinced himself mentally, feeling guilty for his guiltlessness as he picked the window lock on Bifur and Bofur’s toy shop. _But I can’t wait anymore. Bof’ll surely understand..._

Slithering into the dark interior, Nori blinked rapidly to let his eyes adjust. As soon as they did, he couldn’t help but shiver a little. The strange, shadowy outlines of the half-built toys scattered about unnerved him. Taking a steeling breath, Nori made his way to the staircase in the back, trying not to set his feet too heavily on them as they were known to squall and creak.

Nori studied the closed doors he found on the top level, wondering which one was the bedroom he wanted. Cautiously he tried one door handle and cracked the portal open a tad, only to pull it shut again hastily so the contents of the closet wouldn’t spill out and create a waking racket.

The next door was locked, meaning the contents of that room were probably more important. Nori eyed the lock uneasily, wondering if he should risk picking it. Reluctantly he decided he ought to or it would nag at him later. He made swift work of it and poked his head through the crack. _Wrong room_ , he realized agitatedly, pulling his head back too quickly and smacking it on the doorframe.

Chomping down on his fingers to stifle his cry of pain, Nori watched with wide eyes as Bifur woke, propping himself up on an elbow and staring around sleepily. His pale brown eyes widened slightly as they focused on the slightly-ajar door. Grunting suspiciously, the eldest Broadbeam threw back his blanket and leapt to his feet. Nori spun away from the door, pressing his back against the wall of the hallway and praying Bifur wouldn’t come out to investigate.

For once his prayers were answered. Grumbling in Khuzdûl, Bifur slammed the door shut once more and headed back to bed. Breathing a sigh of relief, Nori waited until he’d regained his calm before going to the next door and unsettling that lock as well.

Bofur slept more deeply than Bifur, Nori noted as the groaning door hinges did nothing to disturb his friend. Creeping forward, Nori studied Bofur contemplatively. He was curled in a loose fetal position on his side, his long, unbraided brown hair falling over his face. Soft, sleepy breaths escaped his slightly open mouth.

It was strange seeing him with his hair down, Nori mused, not really knowing why. The other rare times he’d seen Bofur like this, he’d not thought anything of it. Why now? Filing the question away, Nori leaned down and gently squeezed his friend’s shoulder. Bofur stirred, stretching leisurely, his amber-brown eyes still dilated from deep slumber.

When he saw Nori hovering over him, Bofur reeled away from him, throwing a hand out for the mattock that leaned against the wall on the other side of the bed. Nori lunged, grabbing Bofur’s wrist with one hand and stifling his alarmed outcry with the other.

“Shhh!” he hissed. “Don’t shout, mate. Last time you did that, Bifur almost put a bloody axe in _my_ head!”

Bofur sagged against his mattress when he recognized the voice, closing his eyes momentarily. When he opened them again, Nori saw the wrath approaching and knew he’d better take his hands off if he wanted to keep them.

“Nori,” Bofur growled, sitting up as Nori got off of him, “ _what_ on earth are ye _doin’_ here?!”

“Comin’ and fetchin’ you!” Nori declared, grinning. “Cos you promised to go with me on my roam, remember?”

Groaning, Bofur clumsily swept away the bangs strewn across his forehead. “Oh, yeh...Sorry, Nor’, I forgot.”

“Well, at least you packed already, eh?” Nori reminded him cheerfully, gesturing to the bag sitting in a corner. “We can get goin’ now!”

Rubbing his eyes, Bofur muttered, “Ye couldn’t lemme sleep till dawn?”

“Nope. Sneakin’ out is what makes it fun! Now get on some traveling clothes,” Nori urged. “I wanna go!” Grinning as wide as he could so he could pass on the enthusiasm, Nori backed out of the room and closed the door to give him privacy.

Bofur emerged soon enough with braided hair and proper traveling clothes, his pack slung over one shoulder and his mattock resting on the other. Nori laughed at his irritable expression. “Don’t worry, mate, some of your brother’s food’ll cheer you up! Asked Bombur for it last night so it’d be ready for you.”

“On th’ road,” Bofur muttered as he headed down the stairs, slapping a farewell note on Bifur’s door as he passed. Nori followed, pleased that Bofur was taking it so well.

They had made good headway by the time the sun had fully risen and Bofur had perked up a bit. “So why’d ye ask me t’ take this one with ye?” he asked, tightening the straps on his pack.

“Well...” Nori sighed gloomily. “We’re not gettin’ younger. I want to enjoy it while it lasts.”

“But ye know what happens when I come with ye,” Bofur reminded him laughingly. “We always get int’ trouble!”

Nori laughed too. “Trouble spices it up a bit! Besides, I miss you sometimes on the road.”

Bofur paused pensively. “What about yer brothers? Ye miss _them_?”

That caught Nori off guard. “Well, yeh, of course!” he stammered. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Just when we reclaimed th’ Mountain an’ ye stayed fer all those months,” Bofur began, “I thought maybe ye’d finally gotten happy at home. Maybe ye’d stay. Cos even when I’m not with ye, ye end up gettin’ in danger. We all love ye an’ worry. We don’t want anythin’ happenin’ t’ ye when ye’re alone.”

Nori glanced at him in confusion, starting to get worried himself. “You’re not soundin’ like yourself, Bof’.”

Bofur’s shoulders slumped as he murmured, “I don’t feel like meself either. I may sound like one o’ Óin’s portents if I say this, but lately I’ve been feelin’ like Middle Earth is...pushin’ me out.”

Nori opened his mouth to make a comment about what barney that was, but Bofur looked at him for the first time during the conversation and it literally stopped him cold in the middle of the path.

The gleam in Bofur’s eyes that Nori had become accustomed to, the gleam of boundless energy and optimism and fascination with the world, had _dimmed_ , pinched off nowhere near full capacity by the thin wrinkles and scars etched into his skin over time. It was then that Nori realized in disbelief that he was truly _seeing_ Bofur for the first time in years.

Other hints he’d missed due to Bofur’s careful silence suddenly flooded into his mind—the slight limp, the occasional head pain, the gradually-reducing ale intake, the deeper sleep, the forgetfulness, the tighter weave of his braids...

That was why he’d been so bewildered by seeing Bofur’s hair down, Nori recalled with a start. Now that he considered, there had been some fairly prominent gray streaks among the chestnut-brown.

“I...” Nori didn’t know what to say, but he knew he had to say _something_. “Bofur, I...”

The twang of a bow saved Nori the trouble, the fired arrow passing narrowly between their faces. A curse of Black Speech followed the miss, confirming the presence of Orcs.

**‘‘‘,,,’’’**

Surprisingly, Bofur’s reaction time had remained intact. Hoisting up his mattock, he quickly found the position they always took in a fight by twirling his back against Nori’s. “Told ye we’d get int’ trouble!” he hollered as he ducked the swing of a rapier and plunged the blade of his mattock into the Orc’s side with a gush of dark blood.

“I forgive you!” Nori called back, but he was desperately trying to find a way out of this mess. Sure, he was both a hero of Erabor and a crime-lord, one who was skilled in taking on any type of enemy, but Bofur wasn’t. He was a basher—point in the direction to swing a mattock and that’s where he would swing it. He couldn’t be a toymaker without finesse, but he didn’t have as much as Nori. They had to end this fight before he got clumsy.

Knowing the Orc he was fighting presently needed blunt force to die, Nori reached behind him, hooked Bofur’s elbows around his own and flipped him over his back. Bofur turned to land facing the Orc Nori had been fighting, smashing his head in with the flat head of his mattock.

Nori meanwhile, keeping the momentum of his crouch, spun and slashed one of Bofur’s Orcs with one of his kukris knives. Two other enemies were coming from the sides, so he brought both blades up and struck each of their throats. Withdrawing the knife he held in his left hand, Nori used his right to grab his mace from off his back and swing it at the heads of the two, smacking them to the left so he could throw his left-hand knife at another Orc coming.

As Nori ducked and rolled toward the corpse that housed his right-hand knife, Bofur turned around again and swung his mattock in a wide arc through the air, taking out five Orcs that were lunging. As he trundled, Nori shifted his mace to his left hand so he could seize the bloody knife with his right. He ended up once again with his back to Bofur, surging his knife through an Orc’s middle and wincing when entrails splattered on his bracers as he straightened.

Now that the space in front of him was momentarily clear, Nori had time to look around and saw with horror that the Orcs weren’t dwindling as they ought. Worse, some of the ones they had put down were getting back up! What adrenaline fueled this Orcish band? Perhaps they had simply dared to claim land here so they could gradually kill the Dwarves that ventured too far from their home in Erabor.

If they were on the Orcs’ staked territory, Nori knew they were going to lose this fight.

“Bofur, we have to fall back!” Nori shouted above the din. “They’re gonna keep comin’!”

“I’ve noticed!” Bofur agreed, spinning gracefully in a circle to take in the steadily-increasing number of foes. Nori felt him freeze for half a second at the thirty-degree turn point, but he barely had time to wonder why before the head of the miner’s mattock continued turning and came crashing into him.

Nori’s right arm was shattered by the blow, propelling him to the ground on his left. He skidded grotesquely, slamming into the base of a tree. Nori howled in agony, cradling his broken arm as he sat back up. “Bofur, what are you—?!” His demand broke off when he saw the frozen expression on his friend’s face.

Only a second later Bofur’s knees buckled, sending him face down in the dirt. Everything Nori felt in the previous moment—the dirt, the sweat, the pain—it all was blocked out as his vision centered on the shaft buried more than halfway in Bofur’s back...

The shaft of the arrow that would have killed _him_.

“ _NOOO!_ ” Nori screamed, lunging back to his feet and hurling his knife, slaying the archer and causing him to topple out of the tree he’d used as a vantage point. Nori didn’t even stop to watch him fall, slaughtering the other Orcs who got in the way as he scrambled to reach his fallen comrade. When Nori got there he immediately snapped off the arrow so he could roll Bofur onto his back.

“Bofur, please, say somethin’!” he begged desperately.

With the precious seconds it was taking the Orcs to regroup, the Broadbeam was able to obey Nori’s plea. “Nori,” Bofur choked out. “Ye have t’ go!”

Nori shook his head vigorously. “We’re both goin’, mate—”

“M’ spine is broken! I can’t walk!”

“I can carry you—”

“It’s too late!” Bofur gasped. Reaching up, he unclipped his warg tooth earring and pressed it into Nori’s hand. “Leave, now!”

Nori shook his head even as the Orcs prepared to charge him once more. “No,” he repeated in anguish. “Please, Bof’, _please_ —”

“ _Lord Mahal!_ Nori, ye blitherin’ idiot, don’t just sit here! Do somethin’!” Bofur roared, tears spilling down his cheeks as he shoved Nori away. Nori relented at last and tore off down the road toward Erabor. He heard Bofur screaming at his subjugators, lashing out as well as he could, but they both knew it wouldn’t do any good; they both knew that Bofur was simply distracting the Orcs. He was giving Nori time, time to flee.

Nori didn’t know when he reached Erabor, but he found himself sagging against the door to the Guard House, banging his forehead against it repetitively, perhaps believing that it would dispel the fog in his brain. As soon as the door opened, Nori collapsed to the floor, no longer having support.

“Nori!” Dwalin cried in alarm. “What’s happened to you?!”

Nori felt Dwalin’s arms beneath his, pulling him up onto his knees. Before Dwalin could again demand what was wrong, Nori seized Dwalin’s tunic and buried his face in it, weeping inconsolably.

“I killed him!” he wailed. “ _It’s all my fault!_ ”

“You’re talking nonsense!” Dwalin protested, prying Nori off of him. “Nori, look at me!”

Whimpering brokenly, Nori lifted his topaz-brown eyes to Dwalin’s steel-silver ones.

“What’s happened to you?” Dwalin repeated slowly and clearly, no doubt wondering if he had understood the first time. “What’s your fault?”

Nori bowed his head, eyes fixed on his right hand, which was frozen in a fist. Dwalin followed his gaze and carefully pried open his fingers, making Nori moan in pain as the upper bones shifted. Dwalin lurched back when he saw the earring and Nori slumped forward on his knees, touching his forehead to the floor.

“It’s all my fault,” he sobbed again.

Dwalin remained silent for a long time, letting Nori’s sobs be the only sound in the room. When Dwalin eventually did speak, his voice was thick with grief. “I’ll go get Bifur and Bombur.”

**‘‘‘,,,’’’**

“He...” Nori couldn’t even look at Bifur and Bombur, who were sitting in front of him with desperate denial written on their faces as he told them Bofur’s fate. “He couldn’t walk. He told me it was too late and I had to go without him. So I did.”

The floorboards groaned as Bombur lunged to his feet, shouting louder than Nori had ever heard him. “No!” he bellowed, outraged. “You abandoned him, you—you _coward!_ ”

Nori gasped as he was hauled out of his chair and slammed against the wall with Bifur’s hand locked around his throat, squeezing more and more air out of him with every second. When Nori saw the eldest Broadbeam in this feral light, he recognized the truth clearly: Bifur was insane. Insane and feverishly intent on killing him. He would die right here if he didn’t say something. In fact, his vision was already starting to gray.

“I would never—” he choked out weakly, trying to lift his arm. “He gave me—”

Bifur spotted the item in his hand and released Nori suddenly, letting him fall to the floor. “ _Hyübirmizim_?!” he gasped in shock, snatching it away from him and bringing it close to his face.

Bombur approached tentatively and peered over Bifur’s shoulder at the earring, pressing a hand over his mouth when he recognized it. Nori watched them look at each other with the same expression of horror he himself had worn when Bofur had told him to abandon him.

Nori had thought his tears had run out, but this wasn’t the case. They welled in his eyes as he watched Bombur turn and walk to a corner where he stood numbly silent. Bifur completely broke down—not emotionally but mentally. He sank slowly to the floor, drawing his knees to his chest and staring unblinkingly at the wall.

The door opened slowly and Dwalin entered, half of his face stained with black Orc blood. Wheezing, Nori stumbled to his feet as two of Dwalin’s lieutenants limped in behind him, carrying a body.

Nori watched as Bombur whirled around, lunging forward to paw blindly at the body and beg for Bofur to wake up. Slinking forward, Nori stood on the other side of the table upon which Bofur rested. His mate was almost unrecognizable due to the many stab wounds inflicted to kill him. Even paralyzed, Bofur had fought for him, Nori realized, burying his face in his hands.

“You told the truth,” a distressed whisper made Nori look up again. Bombur was cradling Bofur’s head in his hands, staring at his brother’s ear where the warg tooth belonged. “You didn’t take it off him. He gave it to you.”

Nori said nothing in response. Reaching forward shakily, he fumbled with Bofur’s braids, combing them out so he could see the gray streaks in his hair.


End file.
